Underwriting of insurance policies for individuals and businesses involves the application of certain established statistical methods, detailed reviews of historical loss information coupled in with a skilled underwriter's judgment and experience. Currently, many conventional data sources are used including credit rating agency data, historical accident data, and claims data to make underwriting decisions. Furthermore, commercial underwriting poses additional difficulties in the underwriting area. Small and medium size businesses span a wide range of business types, and involve a wide range of business risks and risk characteristics, making it difficult to generate and analyze information to produce rating and pricing policies that can be reliably and consistently applied to different businesses in different geographical locations, industries and sizes.
Current underwriting processes and systems do not adequately take into account the vast array of information more recently available via the Internet. The more explosive recent growth of the Internet, and more particularly, social and business networking type of sites, has developed into a largely untapped area for potentially valuable underwriting information.
It would be desirable to provide systems and methods for underwriting by leveraging community, social and business networking information in the underwriting process.